Closing Out the Search Bar

[marmar]

Closing Out the Search Bar

BY ED FINN
MARCH 01, 20232:02 PM


(Slate) As a child of the ’80s, I can divide my life cleanly into Before Google and After Google. Right around the turn of the millennium, the internet stopped being a tangled thicket of incomplete lists of weird stuff and became a useful research database. Ever since, Google Search has been one of the only technological constants of my adult life, persisting through the rise of smartphones, social media, streaming services, and even drone-based burrito delivery (also, what happened to that?).

In all that time, nobody has been able to challenge Google’s role as gatekeeper to the cornucopia of digital abundance. More than 90 percent of internet users around the world use Google to shop, navigate, and satisfy their curiosity about pretty much everything. The ads Google sells against this activity (and on other websites) have fueled a money-printing machine that generated more than a quarter-trillion dollars in sales last year.

....(snip)....

The click-based economy has made the world more efficient in some ways, but it turned this miraculous global information databank into a frenzied real estate auction with every website scrabbling to climb to the top of the search results, collect the most clicks, and retain the most eyeballs. Every webpage you load is a little slower thanks to the back-end auctions to determine which ads you’ll see. Countless professional journalists fought losing battles against the small-minded metrics of clicks and open rates, and then adapted to them, making “search engine optimization” among the most treasured journalistic skills. YouTube and social media sites chase clicks so intently that they can inadvertently create algorithms that hook users with increasingly salacious and radicalizing content. Google has built an internet where the people with the most clicks win, and Google plays a key role in counting those clicks.

What if that all changes?

....(snip)....

What would it mean to replace the click economy and its cornerstone, the search bar, with something like a conversation? This is what Bard and a ChatGPT-powered Bing are offering: the chance to ask more human questions (Where’s the best place to get a Christmas-style burrito around here, and what drones would you recommend to carry it aloft?) and have sustained conversations with a system that retains context. (Though notably, in an attempt to rein in some of its chatbot’s zanier behavior, Microsoft recently limited users to five questions per session.) Instead of offering you a menu of links (and ads), your interlocutor/informational concierge cuts to the chase, perhaps offering some footnotes for further reading. It will even offer up its answers in a pirate-y voice or rhyming couplets if you ask. ...........(more)

https://slate.com/technology/2023/03/chatgpt-openai-microsoft-google-future-of-search.html

[samnsara]

1. Ask Jeeves!

[bucolic_frolic]

2. Same offering as Yahoo Message Boards, 1999

Loud voices and gangs dominate the flow, you can't keep them out, can't pay enough people to moderate them, so you close them down. Amazon, despite efforts to limit opinions - excluding non-purchasers or users, e.g. - still suffers from the same problem.

[usonian]

3. I wonder how, not if, greedy people will corrupt it.

I always thought that a Google (Waymo) car would not only choose a pizza place destination for you (based on the highest bidder for the privilege) but also lock you in the car and take you there involuntarily.

Don't forget the smartest car of all. Christine.

Ford wants self driving cars to disable features or return your car if you miss payments.

https://www.npr.org/2023/03/03/1160932390/ford-patent-repossession-self-driving-cars

High tech will kill us all if we screw up the low tech. PG&E can't send electricity reliably down a wire, and we're asking tech to manage our lives? Keep it simple. So will greed.

Someone will find an "angle."

[friend of a friend]

4. My main problem with search engines is trying to get information on something that happened before.

If something happens today that has also happened 100 years ago and I want to see that, even if I put in the date, it keeps wanting to tell me about today. You can't type in "No, I want to see what happened 100 years ago." and get that info. I am hoping AI will make searching easier.